Whispers

This is not an admin post, in the sense that it is not going into the rules. Nor is it meant to diminish anyone's enjoyment of the community. But since I am unable to respond directly to a former community member because I have no avenues to do so, I will talk about community involvement and commenting in 100words.

Every community is different. Some people use Dreamwidth for personal journals only. Some use it to share their thoughts or creative works with others. Some come here hoping to find people to talk to and engage with. Some want to limit their involvement in very specific ways. Those are all valid choices.

In 100words, your creative works, however you write them, are your own. But when you choose to share your work in this community, it is meant to be a communal activity. That is why AI works are not permitted here; they do not represent your words, and as the moderator I do not feel that it is fair to readers to post AI works here and pretend that they are your words.

Likewise, the communal aspect here requires that when you post here, you do not turn off comments. Perhaps I should have made that clear before, but it has never come up in the past. When it did come up today, I added it to the guidelines and made a post about it. I also did not delete any posts that transgressed a rule that had not formerly been elucidated. I attempted to reach out to relevant community members and, when that was not possible, I set a reminder for myself to give anyone who needed to change their posts 24 hours the opportunity to do so. I should have made that clear in my admin post today.

You have the choice to participate in the community. It is not a right. You never have the right to be abusive towards authors or readers here.

That being said, written communication is imperfect. Without tone of voice, without facial expressions, without the many indicators of a person's intent, and without knowing the concerns or triggers or history of the person consuming your written communication, it is impossible to perfectly transfer meaning.

Is there a perfect way to transmit meaning? Probably not. But behaving "in a civilized manner" in this particular community means accepting that when you participate here, you act politely and assume a general level of good intent. If you don't like someone's response to your creative work, perhaps you are misunderstanding their comment. Perhaps they did not express themselves well. It really does not matter as long as you all behave in a mature fashion.

As the only moderator of this community, I cannot put myself in timeout. But if you have a problem with me as a commenter, please initiate a discussion with me. Responding in an abusive way to my comment, deleting my comment and your response, turning off comments on your post, and not allowing private messages from me means that I have no ability to engage with you as a community participant in a way that can make this a safe space for everyone.

You don't have to agree with my point of view to be a member of this community. You will abide by the rules if you choose to participate.

(edited to fix a few typos)